smoke free zone

'I TELL ya," says Michael Mann in a voice which brooks no argument, "it's not really about smoking." He is responding to my surprise that the director of The Insider, a riveting attack on the amoral tobacco industry, isn't averse to a drag or two. Russell Crowe also smoked on set, he tells me - and Mann and Eric Roth, while writing the screenplay, blew smoke rings for a year.

He's quit several times, once after a lung infection. "I started smoking when I was 14, so I know all about nicotine addiction. But this film is about what happens when people find themselves in major conflict with huge corporations that throw all their assets and resources into destroying you. That's the central struggle."

Mann, a hard-boiled 50-something whose tough guy veneer may not be a veneer, doesn't charm interviewers. He records this chat himself, and fails to hide his irritation at any devil's advocate moves. If you don't get it, you just don't get it, his unsmiling subtext seems to say.

Based on a true story, The Insider tells the intriguing tale of how Lowell Bergman (a dogged Al Pacino), a producer on America's leading current affairs TV show 60 Minutes, persuaded Jeffrey Wigand (an aged-beyond-recognition Russell Crowe), a former head of research at a massive tobacco company, to reveal the industry's dirty tricks on air in 1995. It was a spectacular coup - until network CBS, running scared of the legal aftershock, pulled the incendiary interview.

The Insider shows, at a gently hypnotic pace, the fall-out of Wigand's whistleblowing. His testimony leads to a settlement against the industry of some $246 billion. The road to moral victory is far from smooth, however; he is sued, smeared, divorced and betrayed.

In Mann's hands, the relationship between Wigand and Bergman is both complex and compelling. "What got me about the story was the challenge for these guys in taking on what they do," says Mann. "Particularly Jeffrey, who acts very courageously. They're imperfect people, with all the psychological acne and mixed motives we all have. I found myself powerfully emotionally connected. They're ordinary people under extraordinary circumstances, taking on incredible odds. And they probably wouldn't hit it off if they just met in a bar."

Is there an echo here of the grudging rapport between Pacino's cop and DeNiro's criminal in Heat, Mann's last movie? "You could be right. What Jeffrey and Lowell respect in each other is not dissimilar to what Hanna and McCauley respect in each other in Heat. Lowell has an abiding respect for Jeffrey's actions, even if he finds him a pain in the ass. And Jeffrey probably finds Lowell an insufferable stickler for journalistic accuracy, yet he respects his actions. That mutual regard is at the core of it.

"The other thing that maybe flows on from Heat is that I really enjoyed working on the strictly domestic scenes of that - the relationship between Val Kilmer and Ashley Judd, the little stories cutting back to the family. There was that kind of chorus of family values, and I had a desire to push myself deeply into characters and situations again."

Having met these men, Wigand and Bergman, was there any onus to be kind to their flaws? "I can't allow that to enter in," growls Mann, avoiding eye contact. "You've got to be responsible, sure; the last thing we wanted to do was victimise or injure anybody. We're not doing smear journalism here - I'm gonna be faithful to the truth as I see it. I care about drama. Audiences are dead smart - you can't fool them. They know when you're telling the truth and when you're being phony."

The tobacco companies, however, have clearly taken offence. "That industry has a history of being litigious," says Mann. "They know they're pariahs, and they're constantly on the defensive. They take on, and win, a tremendous amount of legal battles, and prior to Wigand they won every time through sheer money.

The Insider sees electric performances from both Crowe and Pacino. Crowe, the star of LA Confidential and Romper Stomper, is up for an Oscar.

"I compare the Jeffrey in the film to the Jeffrey I know, not the mysterious guy I first read about in the Vanity Fair article that originally broke this story," Mann says of Crowe's performance. As for Pacino, he's content to perpetuate the legend: "He's one of the great actors." What's unique about him? "Al is Al. He's artistically very youthful he's, like, 35, as an artist. He's not the least bit tired or jaded."

After Heat, had Mann and he developed a shorthand? "Oh, yeah, yeah. But each film's different. If Al's playing a different role, he's a different guy. So he wasn't Vincent Hanna here, he was Bergman." Is he in character even between takes? "No, it doesn't go that far," Mann almost smiles. "But he becomes a different kind of guy."

After studying English Literature at Wisconsin University, the Chicago-born Mann moved to London in the mid-1960s. "All through the late 60s I wanted to leave, but there were these terribly important things, like the Cream concert at the Albert Hall, sent as spoilers to keep me here," he says. "Of all the people in my class there, I think I'm the only one who ever made a feature film."

Mann made documentaries and commercials before landing a niche as a writer for Starsky And Hutch and Police Story in the 1970s. Films did follow - The Jericho Mile, Thief (with James Caan), The Keep - but Mann's next big splash was as creator of the series that became an 80s icon of flash pop trash - Miami Vice.

But ask him what he learned from his involvement with such zeitgeist-straddlers as Starsky and Hutch and Crockett and Tubbs, and he says: "Nothing." Not even practical stuff? "No," he says, without emotion. "I tell ya, I think I've always done my own work."

While further grit-with-a-sheen television shows such as Crime Story and Drug Wars brought him respect and Emmys, later movies raised his profile. Manhunter, his 1986 film based on the Thomas Harris book Red Dragon, brought Hannibal Lecter (in the shape of Brian Cox) to the big screen for the first time. Although its thunder was stolen by The Silence Of The Lambs, by 1992 Mann was directing Daniel Day Lewis and Madeleine Stowe through the tempestuous epic scenery of The Last Of The Mohicans. It was Heat, however - the existential crime caper which put De Niro and Pacino on screen together for the first time - that proved Mann was a late-blooming cinematic superman. But he's not one for worrying about reputation.

"I've hit my stride, in a way. And the TV work wasn't that compromised," he says. "Y'know, I'll probably do one or two more films, then make one which is so deplored and condemned that I'll go back to television. It's when you feel good that you make an abysmal piece of crap. Maybe I should intentionally go and make something awful, with no redeeming virtues get it over with. Get the whole backlash thing quick, and then it's - aha! - the comeback."

While it does manipulate our sympathies towards its layered anti- heroes, The Insider draws strength, from avoiding undue sentimentality. Meeting Mann, with his brusque manner, that makes sense. He's a realist. "Wigand's wife is portrayed as caring about the material world - and by the way, what's wrong with that? It's only in movies that we have this fictional bullshit saying people don't care about the material world they construct for themselves. Of course you care about it! Why wouldn't you? You work hard, build a house, put some nice things in it that you like. Why would you want to see it go away? You wouldn't. Okay?"

And with that, he brings the interview to an abrupt end. He must be gasping for a cigarette.

The Insider is released on March 10 Michael Mann was born in 1943 in Chicago. He studied film at London's International Film School and began his career in the 1970s as a writer on Starsky And Hutch, later creating Miami Vice. In 1986 he directed Manhunter, a precursor to Silence Of The Lambs, and in 1992 he scored a major hit with The Last Of The Mohicans, starring Daniel Day-Lewis. The Insider has been nominated for six Oscars including best director.

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