The actor who compared Michael Mann to Napoleon: “I was really fucking pissed off”
He may have cooled off somewhat in recent years, but for a while, Michael Mann was one of the most consistently acclaimed and visually inventive auteurs in the industry. He was never regarded as an overtly tyrannical auteur, even if one of his actors did compare him to Napoleon after they worked together.
After debuting with the cult classic thriller Thief, it was clear Mann thrived in high-stakes genre fare. That makes it strange that he decided to follow it up with the supernatural horror of The Keep, which endured such a disastrous production that the filmmaker has effectively disowned the picture and refused to talk about it ever since.
His third feature captured the best of both worlds. Mann became the first person to bring Hannibal Lecter—or Lecktor, in this case—to the screen when he cast Brian Cox as the cannibalistic psychiatrist in Manhunter. It was a thriller with shades of horror, and the experience he’d gained dealing with both individually served him incredibly well.
Of course, the worst thing that happened to Manhunter was The Silence of the Lambs, which was released several years later and swept Mann’s overlooked gem under the cultural rug. Cox was phenomenal as Lecter before Anthony Hopkins rendered him obsolete, but Tom Noonan didn’t have the greatest of times working with a director he was happy to compare to an all-conquering military general.
The versatile character actor played serial killer Francis Dollarhyde, and while he was suitably chilling, he was miserable from his very first audition after being made to wait for hours. “Finally, they brought me in, and I was really fucking pissed off,” he told Filmmaker Magazine. “That’s all I knew: I was going to get in there, and I was going to read the fucking scene and just leave.”
Clearly, his real-life anger came in handy, and he was awarded the part despite his initial impression of Mann being that of fear. “Michael’s sort of a scary guy, even though he’s not huge, and I learned over time that you really don’t talk back to him or give him shit, ever,” Noonan continued. “He’s like Napoleon.”
The actor learned during that first audition that the director wasn’t somebody to be trifled with, and he carried that feeling with him throughout production. It would have been a strange time for Noonan, who was so committed to the role of Dollarhyde that he deliberately isolated himself from the rest of the cast, which left him feeling more alone than ever when he was at the very least a little terrified of Mann.
Not that it hampered his performance, with Noonan’s mixture of method and trepidation allowing him to give a much better performance than Ralph Fiennes managed when the novel was remade a decade and a half later as Red Dragon.
