PUBLIC Enemies is unusual on many fronts. Its Depression-era setting and dense storytelling make it an anomaly, an Oscar hopeful in the middle of a season that is usually more accommodating to Transformers than J Edgar Hoover. It refurbishes a genre – the 1930s gangster movie – that Hollywood studios have left largely unexploited in the two decades since Brian De Palma's Untouchables.
And, appropriately given its subject matter, it leaves a trail of cinematic corpses in its wake. The film's meticulous visual sheen and its portrayal of two men clenched by obsession – bank robber John Dillinger (Johnny Depp) and Melvin Purvis (Chri
stian Bale), the young, ambitious FBI agent who took him down – makes it look as if it were intended to be a Michael Mann movie all along, but it got there the hard way.
The project began life, sort of, in the mind of Mann before he had embarked on his directorial career. Mann, 66, grew up in Chicago, not far from where Dillinger spent his last months hiding out. In the 1970s, he recalls, "My wife and I used to go to art films at the Biograph", the movie house where Dillinger spent his last night watching the Clark Gable gangster film Manhattan Melodrama, before FBI agents gunned him down on the street outside. Fascinated by the period, Mann began work on a screenplay, not about Dillinger but about Alvin Karpis, one of the last of that era's criminals to be captured.
Years later, in 1999, the author and journalist Bryan Burrough was watching a documentary about another set of outlaws, the Ma Barker gang. Burrough realised he had found a great story: the astonishing chronological convergence from 1932 to 1934 of a rogues' gallery comprising Dillinger, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, Machine Gun Kelly and the Barkers, just as Hoover was attempting to create America's first centralised law-enforcement system.
Burrough pitched the idea to Robert De Niro and Jane Rosenthal's Tribeca Films, which sold the idea to HBO as a multicharacter, eight-hour mini-series, with Burrough as executive producer and writer.
Burrough says he quickly realised he didn't "know the first thing about writing screenplays". By 2000 he had amicably left the project and was researching a book about the same material. But while Burrough's book, Public Enemies, began to come together, the mini-series fell apart. HBO returned the rights, then Michael Mann jumped in with an offer. They sold the project to Universal with the help of a powerful partner: Appian Way, Leonardo DiCaprio's production company, which stepped in when DiCaprio expressed a desire to play Dillinger.
Still, Burrough assumed the film would never happen. "There are a million different ways for a Hollywood project to die," he says, "and this had already died once. Then, in December 2007, I get an e-mail saying not only that the movie had been green-lit, but that it was going to star Johnny Depp. I thought it was a joke."
It was no joke. Christian Bale signed up, fascinated "not only by Purvis's pursuit of Dillinger", he says, "but by his pursuit to achieve the vision of Hoover, and his reaction when Hoover seemed to compromise his vision of how to enforce the law."
Like Heat (1995), which paired De Niro as a master thief and Al Pacino as a police lieutenant, the final film positions two A-list stars on opposite sides of the law, and, like Heat, the two stars barely share a scene. Like The Insider (1999), Mann's most acclaimed film, Public Enemies looks closely at two skilled professionals who each struggle with personal codes of honour. And as in Manhunter (1986), Mann seems enthralled by the subject of a lawman so willing to pursue a criminal that he endangers his sense of himself.
"Honestly, no," Mann says, laughing when asked whether the thematic consistencies are deliberate. "What I was taken with was the love affair between Dillinger and his girlfriend, Billie Frechette. He didn't have a mother and was desperate for love of women. She needed a father. They were pre-formed for each other."
Several US actresses wanted the part of Billie. Marion Cotillard won it even though her English was less than rock steady. "But she's ferocious," Mann says. "She's so focused and artistically ambitious that you knew, come hell or high water, she was going to get there."
Mann, exhausted after making the film version of Miami Vice, had to cram preproduction into 11 weeks. "And then we had radical weather," he says. "Hailstorms. So the movie became a race to get what I had to get."
He finished with a couple of days to spare.
Mann is known as someone who wants every visual and technical detail nailed down. Surprisingly, he says that wasn't the primary challenge on Public Enemies. "The biggest struggle, for me is always: Get the story to land," he says. "Get it to work. You know John Dillinger is going to die in front of the Biograph. So by then the story has to have hijacked the show-and-tell nature of the plot. The story has to be about the inner experience of the guy, so that by the end it's not about him getting shot. Is your heart with him? Do you know him? That's the battle."
• Public Enemies is in cinemas from today and will be reviewed in Friday's Scotsman.
