Entertainment Weekly, April 2009 – Public Enemies
Title: Public Enemies
Author: Chris Nashawaty
Publication: Entertainment Weekly
Issue: April 2009
Anyone who’s seen 1981’s Thief or 1995’s Heat knows that Michael Mann can pull off a heist movie. So it’s not surprising that the tough-guy writer-director would be drawn to the story of the most storied bank robber of them all, John Dillinger. Back in the 1930s, a time when most Americans were being hammered by the Depression, Dillinger launched one of the most dizzying crime sprees ever recorded. It turned him into a national folk hero. After all, he was daring to do what the rest of the cash-strapped country could only dream of: sticking up banks, which had gone from trusted institutions to the fat-eat enemy of the working man.
Timely, no’?
Mann was raised in Chicago, the setting of one of Dillinger’s actual bank heists, and he’d been tiptoeing around the idea of a Dillinger movie for decades. “The Biograph Theater, where Dillinger was finally gunned down, was a place that my wife and I used to go on dates, 30-some years age,” he says, laughing. In fact, back in the ’70s, Mann wrote a script about the early days of the FBI when it hunted down gangsters such as Dillinger. “Nothing ever happened with it,” says Mann, “but I guess you could say it’s been in the back of my brain all these years.”
