CHICAGO — Michael Mann, the son of Jack and Esther Mann and the director and co-writer of "Public Enemies," grew up all around Chicago. At 66, his voice retains remnants of the flat, hard "a's" of his old neighborhood.

His reputation as another sort of hard-a precedes him.

The director of "Thief," "The Last of the Mohicans," "Heat," "Ali" and "Collateral" and the creator of "Miami Vice" has been described widely as a perfectionist, a hothead, a martinet and a writer-director not afraid to make people — movie stars, extras, everyone — wait a good long while, as he checks things such as an actor's collar or a selection of ties or the way the light's hitting the pavement. One detail after another, in a single shot among hundreds. Or thousands.

Mann returned last year to his native Chicago to film much of "Public Enemies," which covers the final, blaze-of-infamy year in the life of bank robber John Dillinger. His mother, Esther, made it to the Chicago premiere last week.

"She liked it a lot," Mann says with a quick smile. His lunch has been wheeled within striking distance outside a suite at the Peninsula Hotel, where he's sitting for interviews.

"Metaphorically, at least, the movie takes her back to the old neighborhood; she was 17 in 1933, the year before Dillinger died." Mann's speech patterns are punchy, telegraphic.

"Chicago? I love Chicago. Better now than it ever was. Absolutely. L.A.? Nowhere near it."

Its civic limitations aside, Los Angeles has brought out the best in Mann as a filmmaker, and the other way around.

A viewer can get lost, wonderfully lost, in the cool, sleek lines and inky shadows of "Heat" and "Collateral," two of his most compelling underworld tales.

Unlike Martin Scorsese, he says, Mann didn't grow up obsessed with the movies. He liked them, he says, just as he liked bowling. He once told an interviewer that filmmaking was "a sissy's profession where I come from." He studied English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where, he says, he got a "fantastic liberal arts education" and started experimenting with filmmaking. (Seeing "Dr. Strangelove" at age 21, he says, changed his life.) A couple of years later he moved to London, working briefly in advertising, outside the same circles populated by future film directors Alan Parker, Ridley Scott and Adrian Lyne.

Then Mann came home, made documentaries and broke into a long, storied career in television, which began with a writing gig on "Starsky & Hutch."