Jamie Foxx as Detective Ricardo Tubbs in Miami Vice |
If you’re looking for cops in neon blue t-shirts under white suit coats with pushed-up sleeves and sock-less shoes who live on houseboats with alligators named Elvis, director Michael Mann has news for you: his latest film is not your father’s Miami Vice. That’s especially intriguing since the filmmaker himself is the father of the 80s undercover cop show as the executive producer during the original run from 1984 to 1989. As Mann and stars Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx tell Hollywood.com, for this modern interpretation of the classic series, there’s something entirely different in the air tonight.
Hollywood.com: Michael, you had huge success with this series 20 years ago. Did you worry about going back to do it as a movie?
Michael Mann: First of all, it's all Jamie's fault, because he talked me into this, starting in 2002, at Ali's birthday party.
Jamie Foxx: Yeah, I did.
Mann: But when the proposition became really exciting for myself, and then for all of us, was the idea of really getting into undercover work, and what it does to you, what you do to it, and the whole idea of living a fabricated identity that's actually just an extension of yourself, and doing it in 2006 -- doing it for real and doing it right now. If you think about it, that then defines a whole bunch of stuff. You're not going to have crocodiles or alligators, and you're not going to have sailboats. You're not going to have nostalgia. And, you're going to do it for real, as a big picture that's going to be R-rated because you do dangerous work in difficult places where bad things happen, you have relations with women, there's sexuality and there's language, and that became an exciting proposition. But, it started with the real function, for the actors, and myself as well, as what is undercover work, for real? What is that stuff? And then, all these folks went and did a lot of that work themselves.
Foxx: I was in it because it's hot. The hotness of this idea. When I talked to Michael Mann, and just learned about who Michael Mann was, I made a couple rookie mistakes, saying, "Why don't you do Miami Vice? You did it as a television show. And we do Jay-Z, and we do this and we do that." And, he was like, "Get out of here!" But, after enough of me going up to him and saying, "Look, I really think that this is a great opportunity for you to take a commercial hit, a franchise, and bring the real film capability that Michael Mann has together." So, now, we're all protected, in the sense of we're doing a big-time summer movie, but it's still held together by the Michael Mann way of thinking. So that's why I wanted to do it.
Colin Farrell: Here, here. No. As the two boys have said, it was Jamie's idea. I had been talking to Michael for a couple of years about finding something to do together, and then this came along and it was just the perfect opportunity. We all know Michael can handle an action sequence, whether it's the piece that he did with The Last of the Mohicans, or whether it's that very famous scene in Heat, he can understand the choreography of an action sequence, and a very highly volatile one. But unless it's backed up with some human drama, and unless you have some kind of emotional investment in the characters…He understands that the validity of doing big-scale things isn't there, unless you really do care about the characters that you're watching. So with that in mind, I didn't really think much about good old Don Johnson. If I was to think about the early Crockett, I would have been in f*ckin' trouble, because I would have been arguing with him over the suits that I wanted to wear, and no socks with my slip-ons, and all that kind of stuff. And, where's my crocodile? Jamie said that he met Don in a restaurant in Los Angeles, and what did he say?
Foxx: "You tell Colin Farrell, when he's through with my jock strap, to give it back."
[Laughs]
Farrell: I'm still waiting, but it never arrived -- the jock strap. It might have added something interesting to the character. "Why is he always itching his balls?" "He's wearing Don Johnson's jock strap." But, no. Miami Vice the TV show was the original genesis for this piece, but we approached it from, as Michael said, a very contemporary standpoint, and it's its own entity, really.
HW: Colin and Jamie, how will this Miami Vice make people forget the old Miami Vice? And, how challenging was it for you to also step into the shoes of those particular actors? Was it hard for you to maintain a completely different degree of freshness to the roles?
Foxx: Not everybody is thinking about the television series because I don't think that people are actually remembering every single episode. That's why it's a different thing. This is just a hot concept, hot movie, and I don't think they're going to be comparing the two. I always view things like this, and you tell me if this plays true to you. I view things like, "What do I want to see when I'm in the movie theater?" I'm not quite as dense as Michael Mann is, in that sense. I've got my popcorn, I'm sitting there, and I'm thinking, "What would be hot to see right now? A car, two guys in Miami, Jay-Z on the soundtrack, and something is going down." Not everybody is relating back to what they saw. They know what happened with Miami Vice years ago, but they're ready to go see what the new thing is. A lot of kids who are like 17, 18, 19, 21, that are watching this trailer, are into the hipness of Colin Farrell, of maybe Jamie Foxx, and they're going, "That looks hot. I want to see that." I put my hoodie on and sneak into the theater, or take a girl to the theater and act like I don't know the trailer's about to run, [laughs] and I go, "Oh, they're running this? Oh, this is crazy!" And then, I head people say, "Oh, man, I've got to go see that," and then I pull the hoodie off and let people see that I'm in the theater, and then I bounce. I do that a lot. And, that's how it is. For the sake of it, it's commercial. It's really that commercial thing that you attach yourself to and you go with that, but like I said, this is where you're grounded, in that situation. So, I don't think that there's going to be that comparison.
Mann: We never conceived of it as a derivative. It's 2006, it's Miami Vice for real, right now, and, at it's core, it has an emotional, overt way of telling its story, and it takes place in the alluring, perfumed reality of Miami, in which you've got this layer of things that are very sensuous and beautiful, and underneath it, there's stuff that's very, very dangerous. So, in that sense, it has an independent origin. I don't think people will be sitting there and comparing the two. The two are co-equal. The series occupies its place in cultural history, for better and for worse, and this is 2006. It's a new day.
Foxx: You saw Starsky and Hutch, but it wasn't anything like [the original]. Do you understand what I'm saying? You're not taking Miami Vice, the series. You're taking the spirit of that and you're doing the movie.
Mann: That's exactly right. It's the spirit of it. It's the core of it. It's who these people are. So, at the core of Crockett is Crockett, at the core of Tubbs is Tubbs, but they're re-imagined in 2006, in a different world, in a different place, in a different Miami.
HW: Michael, the music was such an integral part of the television show. How important was it for you to maintain that level of authenticity, in terms of the music, with this film?
Mann: Music is always key to me, whether it's Miami Vice or not Miami Vice. It's dictated by the story, about what Crockett and Tubbs and Isabella and Trudy are doing. And, since the movie tries to get into the lives of these folks as intensely as possible, I wanted music that, hopefully, had the power to do that, consequently, the Mogwai and some of the Audioslave. So that's what informed most of those choices.
Photo(s) by Universal Pictures- © 2006- All Rights Reserved