Roving Ninja Jake Mooney talks with G. Mac Brown, from the set of Sophia Coppola’s film Somewhere, about Public Enemies, the upcoming John Dillinger movie starring Johnny Depp and Christian Bale. Read Part 1

Tommy Guns, Live Ammo on Set, a Demand for Violence

30 NINJAS: You said that the shootout between Dillinger and the FBI at the Little Bohemia Lodge was a 14-minute sequence of pure action, with no dialogue and 12,000 rounds of ammo fired. That seems like a pretty arduous scene to shoot.

GMB: It was huge, because the gunfight went on all around the building, so we had to have fake plugs put in all over the place, and so many sugar-glass windows, inside and out. The amount of violence that Michael demands — to get him excited it’s gotta be loud and big. And he likes to be excited, so … it was wild.

I would say that the other kind of unique thing about Michael Mann — I was warned and told, “Now, he’s gonna want to do this and you can’t let him do it” — he’s famous for liking to use live ammunition. He’s just like a little kid; you know, it’s that blanks are blanks, and they’re blanks. You don’t know what it really feels like until you shoot a real bullet. And the story’s sort of famous of Heat or Miami Vice, you know, having real ammunition on set. Which obviously is very much frowned upon in our industry these days. Which I’m sure we never did, but we certainly took the guys out to police ranges — and again, this is one of those things where Johnny said, “I’m not doing that,” but then went out and did it and had a ball. They fired old submachine guns, and guns of all kinds, and shot at cars and broke windows. Beautiful old … those big round tommy guns that are just fantastic. And you see in the movie the gun flash that it gets and the barrel flash and, you know, it’s just brilliant. There’s many scenes that are actually lit from the flash of the guns.

30 NINJAS: So if I have an image in my head of Johnny Depp, before filming, at a gun range, shooting up an old junked-up car with a tommy gun, that’s accurate?

GMB: Absolutely. And you see, that’s where Michael is really brilliant, because of that little tidbit of excitement that Johnny found out on that back lot shooting that car. Johnny’ll start saying, “I’m not gonna do this, I’m not gonna enjoy this … This is fun … I’m gonna do this … gimme more rounds, let me shoot more!” You know? And you see that now: When he’s dressed in the first shot of the movie and hanging on the running board of a car driving out of town shooting at cops, it’s real.

30 NINJAS: By the way, you mentioned this a couple times and I wanted to ask you about research that went into the cars and the weapons. Was there a good bit of that done?

GMB: I mean, beyond … beyond the beyond. Michael is a car guy, and he’s a gun guy, and he’s a guy’s guy, you know, so he’s 60-plus years full of caring about all that stuff and being a connoisseur of it all. And when he gets a movie he not only has this whole personal history, but then he reads everything he can find. Really, the stack of research is probably three feet tall that he hands out to all of the crew. Three feet of paper that’s given out in sections and over and over. So every time, he knows how long a barrel should be, he knows what the stock should be made out of, he knows if there’s a custom-made stock that looks a little better, and he knows that if he cuts this barrel down by four inches that’s what it actually was. Nothing’s good enough until it has his mark on it, and his mark on it is based on some factoid that he’s known. And whether the general audience sees a difference, I don’t know. But that’s what makes a Michael Mann movie better than another’s.

Depp vs. Mann: Two Alpha Males Going at It

30 NINJAS: I can imagine that [the meticulous attention to detail] might be a little stifling for an actor. I take it that Depp and Mann worked things out well enough, but was there any kind of adjustment there?

GMB: I think any time you have two alpha males like Johnny Depp and Michael Mann together who both are absolutely sure they know how to do it best, yeah, there’s stuff to work out. In this case, they certainly butted heads and battled their way through it, but I think it brought stuff to both sides that only enhanced the movie, which is what I told Michael and Johnny from the beginning. They’d complain about the other, and it was clear that, “Are you kidding? You’re only doing better because of it.” So it was one of those things where it was tough times, but all for good in the end.

30 NINJAS: Is it a case of two different approaches, that Johnny may not be such a big preparation guy, but more inclined to spontaneity?

GMB: I think that that was certainly one of the things, for sure. You know, Michael by no means wants to crush spontaneity. He just wants to give you the basis to find the real spontaneity that you should be feeling at that moment, rather than what you might feel just by living in 2009. And feeling that Johnny is a movie star who lives a kind of protected life, and Michael wanted to get him out and get his hands dirty. And from Johnny’s point of view, the character is gonna come from within him, not from something a director tells him. They made each other mad, and that anger only made them both better in their performance. It made Michael work harder, it made Johnny work harder, and there’s a fierceness that’s in the movie that you see it — that it wasn’t just acting, it wasn’t just directing, it was two men going at it.

30 NINJAS: Hopefully, not with the live ammunition.

GMB: No, no, no (laughs). That was one of my drives: to not let any live ammunition anywhere near the set. Because who knew where it might have gone?

Read More G. Mac Brown in Part 3

Read Part 1

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