Michael Mann names his favourite Stanley Kubrick movie: “It probably still is”
Ever since he made his feature-length debut with 1981’s Thief, Michael Mann has been a director to keep an eye on. With Manhunter, he brought Hannibal Lecter to the big screen years before The Silence of the Lambs. Crime drama Heat, boxing biopic Ali, and gangster flick Public Enemies make up just part of his impressive resume, all of which have left a lasting impact on audiences and the movie business as a whole.
Like any good filmmaker, Mann is a student of the game. He’s given his opinion on many of his contemporaries and predecessors, including the legendary Stanley Kubrick. In an interview Collider, he reflected on Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. “It probably still is my favourite Stanley Kubrick movie,” he said, but the impact it had on him goes far deeper than mere affection.
When Kubrick’s tale of nuclear madness first came out, Mann was in his early 20s. “I wasn’t really interested in cinema until I saw Dr Strangelove, alongside a set of films by F.W. Murnau and G.W. Pabst for a college course,” he told DGA Quarterly. “These were a revelation. I’d already seen some of the French New Wave and some Russian films, but the idea of directing, of shooting a film myself? Never. Prior to Strangelove, it simply had not seemed possible that you could work in the mainstream film industry and make very ambitious films for a big mainstream audience.”
He described the entire film as one big third act, with particular praise for the character played by Sterling Hayden. “There’s no prelude, no context,” he said of the unhinged air commander. “We’re just with him, we know who the guy is, and we catch up along the way. Even as a young man I found that intensity very exciting – how immediate it was.” As soon as these images entered Mann’s eyeballs, that was it. He was going to be a director, and a damn good one at that.
In that same conversation with Collider, Mann was also complimentary of another of his idol’s movies. “The first Stanley Kubrick movie I ever saw was Paths of Glory,” he said. “I particularly was interested in it because it’s probably the best adaptation of a novel. Reading it, it’s a perfect kind of a recombinant recreation into a two-hour narrative.” Paths of Glory, based on a novel of the same name by Humphrey Cobb, stars Kirk Douglas as a French colonel who, after refusing to lead his troops into a suicidal mission during World War I, faces trial for cowardice.
Paths of Glory often gets lost in the shuffle when it comes to Kubrick’s body of work, but it should not be slept on. At just 88 minutes long, it packs in so much action and intrigue without ever feeling overstuffed. It shines a harrowing light on war in a small, more human way, exposing the real people at the heart of famous battles. It’s a banger for sure, but, as Mann himself said, “I think Strangelove still is my favourite.”
Mann is just one of many great directors and actors to have been inspired by Kubrick’s mad genius. He has taken the magic that Dr Strangelove made him feel and passed it on to millions of other people through his own work, ensuring that the next generation of filmmakers could find their own spark.
