It comes as a surprise that Michael Mann is not an anti-smoking fanatic. After all, he has just made the most powerful and damning indictment of the US tobacco industry ever seen on a movie screen. "But I smoke from time to time, been smoking most of my life," he says. "I would not want to go to a film that presumed to preach to me or tell me how to lead my life."
In fact, The Insider, Mann's new film, is as much about the way in which corporate interests threaten free speech and the rights of the individual as it is about the tactics of what Americans call "Big Tobacco". Based on a 1996 article for Vanity Fair magazine, Mann's film tells the story of Jeffrey Wigand, former head of research and development at the tobacco company Brown & Williamson, and a central witness in the lawsuits filed by 50 states against the tobacco industry, which were eventually settled for the staggering sum of $246 billion. Wigand had taken his story, about the way in which the industry had concealed data about the dangers of tobacco, to investigative reporter Lowell Bergman, a producer on the flagship CBS news programme, 60 Minutes. With the big legal guns turning on Wigand, Bergman tried to protect him by arranging a counter-suit against Brown & Williamson, but simultaneously found that his superiors at CBS were trying to muzzle the story.
The Insider is a big, ambitious film which manages to tell this complex story through the eyes of its two key protagonists, Wigand (Russell Crowe) and Bergman (Al Pacino). "My interest in this precedes the publication of that article," says Mann. "But there was a remarkable confluence of a number of people, who were all involved in the gestation of this project. I've known Lowell Bergman from around 1991, about four or five years before these events. I was talking to him on the phone around 1995, when all this was going on, and I told him I thought it was a really remarkable story, and I'd like to make a picture about it. "I think that these guys were particularly courageous. I liked the fact that there was nothing melodramatic or simplistic about what they did. There were all the conflicts and rough edges that you'd find in the way we lead our lives. So there was all that miasma of imperfection."
Pacino may be the more familiar face, but it's Crowe, as the tortured, uncertain Wigand, a company man and scientist who finds his life crumbling around him, who forms the moral and dramatic core of the film. It's a superb, unshowy portrait of an ordinary, flawed human being under intolerable pressure, and an unusually acute exploration of that devalued concept, heroism.
"These are your choices," says Mann. "Go forward as the man of science, so that you feel good about yourself, and here's what happens: you can go back to Louisville; find yourself incarcerated; the pressure's going to destroy your family; you've robbed your kids of the true potential of their lives, because they probably won't get anywhere near the kind of education you could have provided for them . . . it goes on and on and on. That's what happens if you do that silly-assed phrase, the right thing. On the other side, what happens if you don't do that? I felt what would have happened was that his identity would have been annihilated and he would have been no good to himself, his kids or anyone."
Hollywood is often criticised for oversimplifying or sentimentalising stories like this, but The Insider is an exception, a multi-layered, beautifully crafted film reminiscent of the classic conspiracy thrillers of the 1970s, like All The President's Men or The Parallax View. It's the latest in a line of provocative, individualistic movies from Mann, one of the most singular and stylistically interesting directors of his generation, who in recent years has brought his particular vision to bear on the Western (The Last of the Mohicans) and the heist movie (Heat). (He also created the quintessential 1980s cop show, Miami Vice, but let's not hold that against him.) Manhunter, his 1986 version of the Thomas Harris serial killer novel, may not have received the acclaim accorded to the later Harris adaptation, Silence of the Lambs, but many see it as the better film, while Thief, starring James Caan, is a brilliantly stylish exploration of a criminal outsider.
Like all Mann's films, The Insider is a meticulously assembled mythic fable. Mann is not one of those directors who believes in discovering the film on the set - indeed, with Heat, he actually made the same film twice, first as a relatively low-budget TV movie with an unknown cast, and then as a star-laden, big-budget Los Angeles crime epic, starring Pacino and De Niro.
"I really have to be arrested by the subject to want to make it, and the script has to be totally right," he says. "The story has to have some depth to it, meaning that the whole thematic life and the premise has to be worked out." Once the script is ready, he says, the actual filming is "a process of execution, not one of discovery".
He's proud of the fact that the resulting films have a depth and a texture which he believes causes viewers to return to them. "It's probably why the films play well multiple times. A lot of work's gone into them, so there's a lot of stuff going on there. When I see the home video rental figures on Mohicans and Thief and Heat, they are rented way more than the statistical average. I think that's because people want to see them more than once."
There's certainly plenty of food for thought in The Insider. The failure of CBS to support its journalists was, he believes, the most disturbing aspect of the whole affair. "We all know, as cynical adults, about the compromises that go on left, right and centre. What was interesting about this was the degree of the failure. For local news in Louisville, Kentucky, to run stuff in the interests of Big Tobacco was hardly surprising. For 60 Minutes to not put on the air the biggest case of corporate malfeasance in US history - which was eventually settled, don't forget, for $247 billion - was another matter. It wasn't just dramatic to me: it was dramatic to the New York Times and Walter Cronkite and the Washington Post, right throughout the media."
For journalists, the ethical issues can quickly become very blurred, he points out. "The corporation doesn't come in and say, we're in danger, we want to sell the company, so don't put this on the air. These are very sophisticated people, who are very good at their jobs, so you get very persuasive legal reasons why they might not do it."
He agrees that the wave of takeovers and amalgamations in the global media threatens free speech, citing the recent controversy in Los Angeles over coverage of the new Staples Centre by the Los Angeles Times, whose parent company was an investor in the centre. "The corporate side had neglected to reveal to their editors and reporters that their company was an investor in the Staples Centre. The whistle got blown by the New York Times, and the corporate side apologised, but that doesn't mean it's not going to happen again. There've been cases with ABC, which is owned by Disney, where stories were yanked because they were injurious to Disney."
This last comment is said with some emphasis - perhaps because The Insider is itself a Disney production. Given the power and litigious tendencies of the corporations involved, presumably, there must have been a lot of legal consultation before the script was approved. "Yeah, but in American law all that meant was that everything we showed had to be substantiated, with documentation to back it up. You can take some creative licence, but you can't defame somebody and you can't invade their privacy. Our documentation ran to 8,000 words of transcriptions. I insisted that should be done. I didn't want to write stuff, shoot it and then discover there were legal problems."
And what do the two main protagonists think of the film? "Lowell believes that it's `philosophically, emotionally and psychologically accurate', and he also said that it's ironic that Hollywood has the latitude to come out with something as tough and morally unambiguous, without this facade of presenting both sides, which is an excuse to not get your ass sued, or just laziness.
"With Jeffrey Wigand, on the other hand, who I think is way more exposed, I knew it was going to be very traumatic for him when he saw it. He didn't talk much afterwards. I warned him to really expect to get blown away by this, because all the power of the big screen and the music and all that would bring back stuff he had forced himself to forget. He called me and said it was very powerful and true to what happened to him. That was particularly important to me, because it's not a flattering portrait. It's a realistic portrayal of flawed people like us, and what happens when you put their backs up against the wall."
The Insider opens on March 10th at selected cinemas
