After The Keep flopped, Michael Mann disappeared from the big screen to immerse himself in television production. Miami Vice and now Crime Story. Nothing very satisfying. His role in the very beautiful, quite strange release, Band of the Hand, no doubt went beyond the relatively simple tasks required of executive producers. A personality. Critics’ Award at the last Cognac Film Festival, Manhunter oscillates between fantasy and the whodunit. Everything in it seems out of order, out of sequence, spaced out, out of time, colorless in the extreme.

In your films, there is customarily a juxtaposition of reality with nightmare. Could you shed some more light on this constant interchange?

Right. Some of my characters live out nightmares that are quite real. For example, Peter Strauss in The Jericho Mile and the title character in Thief. Both of them try to escape by dreaming impossible dreams. My other characters find themselves in surreal nightmares. For them the solution is to get their feet back on solid ground. Like Scott Glenn in The Keep, Will Graham, the detective in Manhunter, finds himself trapped, stuck to some degree in madness and nightmare. It bores me to present the events of the story in a realist style. My approach instead is to conceptualize the elements of the plot, taking into consideration the various torments of the human spirit. My aim is to exteriorize the spiritual in the Expressionist manner, and this always leads me to reject realism.

You would have been able, adapting Red Dragon, to simply make a detective story.

Of course, but then I would have really been in the shit. What drew me to the story was its connection to the essence of evil, which emerges in the process of dehumanization that leads a simple human being with no exceptional past to become a killer capable of the most terrible atrocities. And when the victims cease being human beings, they become morsels … bits of matter. I want to understand just what this is all about, and also something about dangerous psychopaths, as well as the influence of social context on the behavior of individuals, such as fascism, genocide. This was the theme I explored in The Keep, whose action is set during the Second World War.