RUSSIA: Michael Mann's "Public Enemies" is well on its way to becoming the big hit in Moscow Film Festival

Record ID: 721248

  • Title: RUSSIA: Michael Mann's "Public Enemies" is well on its way to becoming the big hit in Moscow Film Festival
  • Date: 29th June 2009
  • Summary: (** BEWARE FLASH PHOTOGRAPHY ** ) VARIOUS OF MICHAEL MANN POSING FOR PHOTOGRAPHERS U.S. FILM DIRECTOR MICHAEL MANN ENTERING NEWS CONFERENCE MEDIA (SOUNDBITE) (English) U.S. FILM DIRECTOR MICHAEL MANN, SAYING: "He was clearly a folk hero, a social bandit. He was the second most popular American, second only to the president of the United States at that time, even though he was an outlaw and partly it was because the depression was in its forth year in the United States. It was 25 per cent unemployment, it was so brutal and the public looked upon the banks as the institutions that made their life a misery. So when Dillinger robbed the banks the public had no sympathy to banks so ... and then Dillinger exploited that and held himself in a very generally charismatic ways and on the same time he really is a 19th century bandit in the middle of the 20th century and the forces that eventually crush him are revolutionary, almost darwinian, so he is obsolete and becomes aware of that in the picture. So there is no real application of the example of Dillinger even for his own days, organised crime is becoming coorporatised and police were - instead of being territorial or actually forming which they also did in Soviet Union, and in Italy and in Germany, and in England were forming into modern centralised federal police forces, so both of them were making him obsolete, that is why he is the 19th century bandit."
  • Embargoed: 14th July 2009 13:00
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  • Reuters ID: LVA8IV7AMFGSRC8V7MVCI3R0Q9RQ
  • Story Text: The 31st Moscow International Film Festival came to an end on Sunday (June 28) with the the Russian premiere of Michael Mann's film "Public Enemies."
    The gangster drama from U.S. director Mann premiered in the Russian capital three days prior to its home release.
    U.S. director Michael Mann said at a press conference in Moscow that he was pleased to have the premiere in Russia and told reporters the reasons behind the movie: "It has two aims, one is clearly the drama based on character, that is what I do, and the ambition of the film is to locate audience as much as I am able to do within the frame of experience of Dillinger, in other words rather than looking at a life to try and bring you intimately into his experiences rather than making a period film that looks at 1933, that was to be inside 1933 so that on a raining Tuesday night in March in 1933 you feel that you can almost reach out and touch that black car with the rain on it and you feel like if you were there than this is a immediacy and a heightened reality because to be John Dillinger and live that life, the more I understood about him who was unique and exited man, that is why I made this film," Michael Mann said to reporters.
    The movie stars Johnny Depp and Marion Cotillard in the story of legendary depression-era outlaw John Dillinger - the charismatic bank robber whose lightning raids made him the number one target of J. Edgar Hoover's fledgling FBI and its top agent, Melvin Purvis, and a folk hero to much of the downtrodden public.
    Shrugging off a cold drizzle and disappointing box office receipts, Moscow held its annual film festival to patriotic tales and big screen epics; 16 films from 14 countries were vying for the festival's top honour, the Golden St. George.
    The festival opened in the shadow of comments from one of the country's biggest movie financiers, who said that Russia's film industry needs state support led by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to help it cope with the impact of the global economic crisis.
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