Exclusive Interview: Public Enemies Producer G. Mac Brown, Part 1

Share on Facebook posted 06-25-09 by Jake Mooney

Sometimes, talking about the whirlwind eight-week shoot of Public Enemies, G. Mac Brown tells a story about “Johnny,” and an odd thing happens: It’s not totally clear whether he means the movie’s bank-robbing hero, John Dillinger, or the swashbuckling actor playing him, Johnny Depp. Or whether Brown, the film’s producer and executive producer, is even making the distinction.

But cut Brown, a movie veteran with producing credits on The Departed and Australia, some slack: The shoot got a little crazy. Between the actors firing real tommy guns, the late-night fire emergency at an historic lodge, and the warm-up bank robbery that director Michael Mann wanted to stage off-camera to give the actors some practice, Brown had a lot to keep track of. Then there was Depp, with his in-the-moment acting style, squabbling with Mann, a notorious detail freak who, as the director of Heat and all, knows a thing or two about bank robberies. Not to mention Christian Bale lurking in the background, talking in a Southern accent.

Brown insisted that it all worked out for the best, and any frayed nerves along the way brought a dose of electrifying realism to the finished product, which premieres on July 1.

Brown is, in his own words, “not a big car-crash guy”; his previous movie experiences range from To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar to Last Exit to Brooklyn to The Cowboy Way. Nonetheless, when 30 Ninjas writer Jake Mooney caught up with him the other day, Brown spoke with great enthusiasm about the Public Enemies action sequences, including a rollicking chase in massive 1930s cars and a shootout at the Little Bohemia Lodge, in Wisconsin, where the real Dillinger made his most famous escape.

That the lodge happened to catch on fire in the process was just another dip in the roller coaster.

“There’s bank robbery after bank robbery, and prison breaks. It‘s kind of a non-stop ride,” Brown said, from the set of Somewhere, the Sophia Coppola movie he’s currently working on. “It’s just an incredible Michael Mann experience, in-your-face and loud and hard and fun, and kind of a really fresh look that I haven’t seen before. It’s very exciting.”

“Pure Action”: Fourteen Minutes, 12,000 Rounds of Ammo, Depp and Bale

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30 NINJAS: Can you tell me about Michael Mann’s approach as compared to other filmmakers? I’ve read that he likes to get in there and work the camera himself and things like that.

GMB: When I first met with Michael about Public Enemies he was expecting that it was going to be much more classically photographed, that he was going to go back to film, because of the ’30s historical element of it. So we did our camera tests and he tested the film against digital and different HD cameras, and three weeks before shooting he went back to what he knew best, which was digital. And so the specifics of what the film was going to look like changed at that point.

And then the other thing that was really important to us was that we were facing the possible Screen Actors Guild strike. So that left us 78 days, or something like that, and I think Michael would normally be shooting, easily, 100 days. We were kind of rushing through it in many ways, no time to breathe, no time to second-guess or rethink. It turned into a wild and woolly ride, which I think you can see in the picture. It was kind of a freak accident, but the film is so wonderful for it. It’s part of its brilliance. You know, the planets lined up and the universe brought a gift to him that turned into just a mad romp. And quite possibly just his genius, he knew that that’s where it was headed all the time. He just went with it, and lots of things were shot with three or four cameras. I often felt it was like a big episode of Cops, but with four of the best cameramen in the world, and the best actors in the world, and the best designers and best costumes.

Michael is a freak for research and doing things where they actually happened, which, you know, on one level is just fantastic for him and for the actors. Rather than make it up, he’d say, ‘”OK, this is what actually happened, let’s do it that way,” and all the actors kind of jumped on board with that. And sometimes, it made it very easy. Little Bohemia [a resort in Wisconsin, site of a 1934 gun battle between John Dillinger and the FBI], where there was a huge shootout, we shot there for about eight nights, nine nights. And you know, 12,000 rounds of ammo were shot into this log cabin lodge. That’s about a 14-minute section of the movie that has no dialogue and just pure action.

Johnny Depp: “I’m not fuckin’ robbing a bank!”

30 NINJAS: How did Johnny Depp and Christian Bale do with the whole seat-of-the-pants feel that some of those action scenes have?

GMB: You know, all the different personalities in the movie kind of had different takes on how they wanted to do it, or had done in the past. You know, like I said, Michael really believes in a lot of research and brings only the best people around him, so even if it’s by the seat of your pants, it’s done with, you know, really smart, safe people who knew what they were doing. Johnny’s a guy who doesn’t rehearse, and Michael was a big rehearser, so they had to work that out.

One of the things Michael wanted all the guys to do [as preparation for their roles] was go rob a bank, and wanted me to find a bank and find police and find the stuff so we could pull off a bank robbery, in downtown Chicago, complete with an escape route where they’d get out and they’d get in one car, and go switch cars — you know, make the getaway. And I remember when Johnny first heard, he said, “You know, I’m not fuckin’ robbing a bank. I’m an actor, I’m not gonna rob a bank.” But you know, then he finally did get on board and they did a version of it — no cameras, just purely for the experience — and I think it was helpful for him. It was just for preparation, just so they know that heart-pounding, gut-wrenching adrenaline burst that you get when you walk into a bank and three guys are gonna take full control over 25 people inside a bank, and break into their vault, and make a getaway … [Later, during the shooting of the movie,] once they were there with all the cameras and the police and the people and the costumes and all that stuff, the stealing and the heart of it all, the heart and soul of it, is hard to find. And so Michael feels that if you do that ahead of time and you get to experience it, then you have something to draw on.

30 NINJAS: And after it was all said and done was Johnny persuaded that it was a valuable experience?

GMB: It was — we didn’t ever get to pull it off quite to the extent that Michael wanted to, but we did indeed bring Johnny into the bank and a version of it was done.

Dillinger the Ghost Arsonist? Outlaw’s Hotel Room Catches Fire

GMB: Another scene that deserves talking about, and probably will be talked about, is the end of the movie, where Dillinger gets killed.

30 NINJAS: It was in front of a movie theater, wasn’t it?

GMB: Yeah, in front of the Biograph. The movie theater’s still there, of course, but nothing looks the same and buildings have been built around it. But the geography of, step by step, of where Dillinger walked, and who he was with, and where the FBI were waiting for him, and where the police were, and where each car was, it’s all there in photo research and stories from the day. We recreated it to the inch, so that when Johnny Depp gets shot, his head goes down and lands in the exact spot that Johnny Dillinger’s head landed. The blood pools in the same place — you know, it’s six inches from the manhole on the alley and two feet out from the curb. When it’s finally all done there’s a palpable feeling — it’s like a ghost is there.

Same thing up in Little Bohemia, the room that Dillinger stayed in. They had robbed a bank and Johnny had been shot, pretty badly. And he was in a bedroom up in the corner of the building. And about eight or ten FBI agents surround the place and start a shootout, and they got away. They went out a window and got away — it’s really just a miracle that it happened. Red, his partner, got shot on the way out, but … but they did manage to get away.

And so we’re shooting that. Little Bohemia is the actual place, and Johnny’s in the exact same room where the shootout happened. They had kept the broken windows from the original shootout, and they had a lot of the artifacts, and so the day we shot the main part of his escape, well, that night, after we were done, the morning, dawn (we were shooting all night), and we all left and there was not a soul in the building, everything was done, the room caught on fire. Luckily, one of the guys who worked nearby saw smoke and the fire got put out very, very quickly so it wasn’t the catastrophe that it could have been. But it did feel like you were, you know, messing with the ghosts for sure.

30 NINJAS: Do you know if they have any idea what started it?

GMB: It was a wire in a light. Perhaps when we had done some work, one of the old house lights just got put on and there was some little wire that started a little smoking thing and the ceiling caught on fire. It was half an hour drive back to my hotel, and literally three minutes from the hotel my phone rings and, “You better get back here quick.” And it did burn the room. We took time to put it back together, kind of re-skin it all, stuff like that. But we had other things that we could shoot in the meantime, so it didn’t cost us anything. But you felt like you were messing with the spirits somehow. John Dillinger was saying: “I’m still here.”