Michael Kenneth Mann (born February 5, 1943) is an American film director, screenwriter, author and producer, best known for his stylized crime dramas.

Mann has received numerous accolades including a BAFTA Award and two Primetime Emmy Awards as well as nominations for four Academy Awards and two Golden Globe Awards.

His most acclaimed works include the films Thief (1981), Manhunter (1986), The Last of the Mohicans (1992), Heat (1995), The Insider (1999), Ali (2001), Collateral (2004), and Public Enemies (2009).

He is also known for his role as executive producer on the popular TV series Miami Vice (1984–89), which he adapted into a 2006 feature film.

Mann graduated from Wisconsin with a B.A. in 1965. In 1967 he earned an M.A. from the London Film School.

Mann later moved to London in the mid 1960s to go to graduate school in cinema. He went on to receive a graduate degree at the London Film School in 1967. He spent seven years in the United Kingdom going to film school and then working on commercials along with contemporaries Alan Parker, Ridley Scott and Adrian Lyne.

In 1968, footage he shot of the Paris student revolt for a documentary, Insurrection, aired on NBC's First Tuesday news program and he developed his '68 experiences into the short film Jaunpuri which won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 1970.

“I cannot just make a film and walk away from it. I need that creative intimacy, and quite frankly, the control to execute my visions, on all my projects.”

Mann returned to United States after divorcing his first wife in 1971. He went on to direct a road trip documentary, 17 Days Down the Line. Three years later, Hawaii Five-O veteran Robert Lewin gave Mann a shot and a crash course on television writing and story structure.

Mann wrote four episodes of Starsky and Hutch (three in the first season and one in the second) and the pilot episode for Vega$. Around this time, he worked on a show called Police Story with cop-turned-novelist Joseph Wambaugh. Police Story concentrated on the detailed realism of a real cop's life and taught Mann that first-hand research was essential to bring authenticity to his work. Mann also wrote an early draft of the 1978 film Straight Time.

Mann's trademarks include powerfully-lit nighttime scenes and unusual scores, such as Tangerine Dream in Thief and the new-age score to Manhunter. A common stylistic device in several films (Last of the Mohicans, Heat, Manhunter, The Insider, Miami Vice) is to show principal characters being forced to make critical decisions affecting the plot while overlooking large bodies of water.

Dante Spinotti is a frequent cinematographer of Mann's films. F.X. Feeney describes Mann's body of work in DGA Quarterly as "abundantly energetic in its precision and variety" and "psychologically layered".

Indiewire's 2014 retrospective of the director's filmography focused on the intensity of Mann's ongoing interest in "stories pitting criminals against those who seek to put them behind bars (Heat, Public Enemies, Thief, Collateral, Miami Vice). His films frequently suggest that in fact, at the top of their respective games, crooks and cops are not so dissimilar as men: they each live and die by their own codes and they each recognize themselves in the other."

Mann's films have been noted for their realism when it comes to capturing the sounds of gunfire, with him preferring to use raw audio captured from the scene, rather than a sound mix. Many of his films feature practical effects to produce the action scenes, with actors attending boot camps for weapons handling and firing 'full load' blanks in scenes to accurately represent the sound of live ammunition.

For his work, he has received nominations from international organizations and juries, including the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, Cannes, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

As a producer, Mann has twice received nominations for the Academy Award for Best Picture, first for The Insider and then The Aviator (2004), which Mann had been hired to direct before the project was transferred to Martin Scorsese.

Total Film ranked Mann No. 28 on its 2007 list of the 100 Greatest Directors Ever, and Sight and Sound ranked him No. 5 on their list of the 10 Best Directors of the Last 25 Years (for the years 1977–2002).

Selected filmography

2023 - Ferrari
2014 - Blackhat
2009 - PUBLIC ENEMIES
2006 - Miami Vice
2004 - Collateral
2001 - Ali
1999 - The insider
1995 - Heat
1992 - The Last of the Mohicans
1986 - Manhunter
1983 - The Keep
1981 - Thief
1979 - The Jericho Mile