The draught was long, but when it rains it pours. Seven years after Blackhat, Michael Mann debuted the pilot (and easily best) episode of Tokyo Vice, releases his debut novel Heat 2 (a worthy effort he may expand further) on August 9, and begins shooting Ferrari on August 1. Which of course means there’s things to promote, and if Mann must go through the process it’s better he spend some extended time on WTF with Marc Maron, which just debuted a lengthy discussion.

What begins with shooting Heat‘s coffee-shop scene soon goes deep: the purely practical (growing crops on Mohicans), ethereal (communicating detail in gesture and expression), biographical (Mann’s origins, film-school days, skirting Vietnam duties), and retrospective. (Miami Vice‘s TV-to-film transition fascinates, and confirms suspicions Heat 2 is a way of finally staging the movie’s original ending.) It’s perhaps the most Mann’s discussed his background, including the early short films we (granted) will never see but formed his distinct ethos.

And, yes, a quick bit about Ferrari:

“The whole movie is three months in the summer of 1957 in Enzo Ferrari’s life. It’s an opera, it’s melodramatic. Everything he’s been collides with what he might become. The company’s going bust. His wife finds out about the other woman. It’s spectacularly operatic melodrama in real life.”

Listen below, preferably while staring upon a vast expanse:

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