MICHAEL MANN

I think the resolution involved in the high-def, Blu-ray image demands we pay attention to every detail to a level we've never seen before. The audiences have to believe everything they're seeing. As viewers, we're all so experienced and so much smarter than we realize. With Blu-ray, there will be less tricking of the eye.

Could I have worked under a system where there were Draconian controls on my creativity, meaning budget, time, script choices, etc.? Definitely not. I would have fared poorly under the old studio system that guys like Howard Hawks did so well in. I cannot.

I own a horse and ride, but I don't know racing or betting.

I don't underestimate audiences' intelligence. Audiences are much brighter than media gives them credit for. When people went to a movie once a week in the 1930s and that was their only exposure to media, you were required to do a different grammar.

When you say that I can go and make a movie, I feel like I'm one of the most fortunate men. I feel myself to be a fortunate man that I found something to do that I really love.

Digital makes things feel more real, like you could reach out and touch them.

To just tell a story from beginning, middle and end doesn't motivate me that much.

HBO is not an advertiser-based model, it's a subscription model. So what's significant to HBO is not necessarily the debut of an episode, it's the cumulative numbers.

We take safety very, very seriously on every film I make, and that's why I've never had a serious accident or anybody killed when I make a picture.

Video looks like reality, it's more immediate, it has a verite surface to it. Film has this liquid kind of surface, feels like something made up.

I see the world from the perspective of a 5'8" person, not someone who is 6'4". so naturally, I'm going to choose certain lens heights over and again... Sometimes nature makes choices for you.

I relate more to the fact that 80-inch plasma has just started to become ubiquitous and in people's homes the fairly decent 5.1 sound system and the big screen isn't that out of reach.

Dillinger at one point was the second most popular man in America after President Roosevelt. And he was a national hero for a good reason. He was robbing the very institutions, the banks, which had afflicted the people for four years, and after four years nothing was getting any better.

The best-kept secret about Don Johnson is the fact that he is a terrific actor.

A 65-ft.-wide screen and 500 people reacting to the movie, there is nothing like that experience.

There's a tired notion that the photojournalist has to be disengaged to be able to shoot what he shoots, and that's such a cliched idea of what the experience is. Of course they're engaged, and they're not distanced.

By the time I was 21, I knew what I wanted to do, and that was to direct films.

I've never made any film that I wouldn't go back and re-edit.

What I try to do - I mean 'try,' because you don't get there all the time - is to have impact with content. It's those moments in which you're trying to bring people beyond filmed theater. If I have an ambition, it's that.

Miami is one of these great places that is a really sensual, physically beautiful place.

'Police Story' had some of the best writing on television, and one reason for that is because most of the scripts were based on real cases.

I realized horses have personality when I bought one and I had one, who's now out to pasture, a horse named Drifter. Before that, I was a city boy. Horses, I used to go out to the LaBagh Woods and ride at a stable once every two years or something; no idea about horses. Dogs, I knew, had personalities, but not horses.

Blu-ray and the technologies emerging around it are the premiere format for reproducing what we do as filmmakers. There's more space on the disc, more bit rate.

In 'The Insider,' I had violence - lethal, life-taking aggression - all happening psychologically, all with people talking to other people.

I like change. I don't like being in the same room for too long.