The director Quentin Tarantino said “blew our minds”
The contributions that Quentin Tarantino has made to the crime film genre are largely beyond comprehension. The iconic director pretty much reinvented the crime movie with his debut feature, 1992’s Reservoir Dogs, which even to this day remains one of his best and most memorable efforts.
Tarantino’s follow-up to Reservoir Dogs, 1994’s Pulp Fiction, once again elevated the crime genre by playing in the motifs and tropes of the titular pulp magazines and hardboiled crime novels of the mid-20th century, and it rightfully won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and the Academy Award for ‘Best Original Screenplay’.
Elsewhere, Tarantino continued to explore crime in the likes of Jackie Brown, and several of his other films use criminal enterprise in more subtle ways. For the director himself, though, there is one particular filmmaker who contributed more to the crime genre than any of his peers.
“When Michael Mann came out with Thief, with James Caan, he blew out minds. It was like, ‘roll over John Carpenter, tell Walter Hill the news, you know,’” Tarantino once explained. “It was a new guy out there on the crime film scene who wrote great gritty dialogue, and he had a wonderful visual sense.”
Mann is undoubtedly one of the most acclaimed crime film directors of all time and has taken charge of some absolute monoliths of the genre, including the legendary Heat, starring Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Val Kilmer, Collateral and Manhunter, making him one of the forefathers of crime cinema.
As for Thief, Mann’s debut feature film arrived in 1981 with James Caan in the lead role as a notorious safecracker who tries to free himself from his former life of crime. The film, also starring Tuesday Weld, James Belushi, Dennis Farina and Willie Nelson with a Tangerine Dream soundtrack, was inspired by a memoir by the infamous cat burglar Frank Hihimer.
Tarantino made the claim that Mann’s film actually elevated the crime film genre, saying, “One of the things about Thief was that it was one of the only crime films that came out within a three-year period that had the same resonance as a crime novel. But also, right from the beginning, was that he was a stylist. There was an orchestrator involved; there was a director involved.”
The director also admitted that Mann’s film had a significant personal effect on him, noting. “There are lines in Thief that have affected my life. I have always tried to live my life like James Caan in so far as I am Joe Boss of my own life. He was untouchable because he was untouchable.”
He then pointed out the fact that Thief was a seminal work in the sense that it inspired several action film directors to copy one of Mann’s on-set tricks to get the same visual effect. “Everyone had heard about, after the fact, that he just kept a water truck on his set all the time, just to constantly wet down streets and then all of a sudden that was the thing to do,” Tarantino said. “Thief looks fantastic; let’s get a water truck, just wet down these night streets and throw lights on them.”
Check out the trailer for Michael Mann’s Thief below.
Never Miss A Take
The Far Out Quentin Tarantino Newsletter
All the latest Quentin Tarantino content from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.