Smoke

The Insider, again. Some days it seems like Michael Mann and Kathryn Bigelow are the only American  directors who matter. Which is wrong, of course, but the modern language of meetings and business, the euphemisms of corporate blandness, the power of the telephone and the text message, the dead cold hand of unfeeling legal procedure -- who else now really gets that? Fincher (Sorkin) in The Social Network, but that was that movie's subject. The Social Network wouldn't exist without the visual vocab that Mann minted: documents, coffee cups, whirring photocopiers, sodium lights, rain on the car windscreen. The Insider depicts the modern urban world where everything's talk but the pictures say it all, wordlessly.

Mann talked to Salon.com about directing the subtext:

There seem to be five things going on in every scene.

I wanted to direct, I tried to direct the subtext. That's where I found the meaning of the scenes. You could write the story of certain scenes in a code that would be completely coherent but have nothing to do with the lines you hear.

For example, in the hotel room scene, Scene 35, when Lowell and Jeffrey first meet: All Lowell knows for sure is that Jeffrey has said "no" to helping him analyze a story about tobacco for "60 Minutes." He doesn't know yet that there's a "yes" hiding behind this "no." There's a whole story going on that's not what anybody's talking about.

If you wrote an alternate speech for Jeffrey, it would go: "I'm here to resurrect some of my dignity, because I've been fired, and that's why I dressed up this way and that's why I have these patrician, corporate-officer attitudes." And you could do the same for Lowell, and have him sitting there and saying, "This man wants to tell me something that is not about why he's meeting me."

Al Pacino just took over Lowell's great reporter's intuition to sit there and laser-scan Jeffrey with his eyes. You know, he looks at him, looks at him, and doesn't move, until, after all the fidgeting and shuffling with the papers, Russell, as Jeffrey, gets to say his great line — "I was a corporate vice president" — with the attitude "Once upon a time, I was a very important person." And that [Mann snaps his fingers] is when Lowell has it.

CBS reporter Mike Wallace criticised the film's dramatisations as "excessive".":

Two-thirds of the film is quite accurate. It was dramatized excessively.

How was it watching Christopher Plummer play you?

Mike Wallace: Listen, I could have been a contender if I was that good-looking. He did a good job, I thought, he got some of my tics. But, the basis of the film was that I had lost my moral compass and had gone along with the company and caved in for fear of a lawsuit or something like that. Also, Don Hewitt, who is the Executive Producer of 60 Minutes, but mainly me. That was utter bullshit. It was done for the drama involved. Then finally, at the end, I found my moral compass again, except it was not true.

In a quote from the movie, your character says, "I'm with Don on this." In other words, "Yeah, we should kill it." You didn't do that?

Mike Wallace: Certainly not. In the broadcast that we did do at that time, I did a mea culpa on behalf of CBS. I negotiated it with the people at CBS, which permitted me to say that for the first time in the history of 60 Minutes, for the first time in the history of CBS News, as I know it, I was told not to do something. We weren't going to broadcast something that I had done for fear of a law suit or something of that nature. God, that happily is not my reputation, and it was a lie. But it made it more dramatic.