From the beginning Mann's work has concentrated on loners with a code — honorably dishonorable men and, occasionally, women, whose professions demand huge, often murderous sacrifices. Humanizing Dillinger without glamorizing him, "that's the challenge," the director says. "Realism in and of itself isn't the answer. To me, what's important is to internalize things, getting the audience in the zone with the characters. That's the objective. That's the challenge. But it's not realism."

For years Mann has been out ahead of the high-definition digital video curve.

His decision to shoot a Depression-era gangster picture — albeit a gangster film that's really a love story between Johnny Depp's Dillinger and Evelyn "Billie" Frechette, played by Marion Cotillard — in high-def digital was simple, he says.

Test footage "made me feel like I was there, on a rainy night in Chicago, 1933."

It's about "the closeness of the experience," the hard-edged immediacy of digital versus "the liquid surface" of film. The outstanding sequence in "Public Enemies" plays into Mann's mastery of complicated lines of action and a tremendous amount of gunfire. Dillinger's hiding out in a lodge in northern Wisconsin, the Little Bohemia. Federal agent Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale) and his men know it, and have come for their quarry.

A melee ensues. "The most exciting thing," Mann says, "is if I can convey what it felt like to be there. I try, anyway, for some authenticity. That's where the drama is. It lies in intense experience."

Mann is a paradox. He works with A-list actors on A-list budgets, yet his films have a ruminative quality that can keep mass audiences at bay. Only one of his features to date, "Collateral," cracked the $200 million mark worldwide. Clearly expectations are running high for "Public Enemies" to top that.

To Mann, Dillinger was the last of the Mohicans, an old-school bank robber with his own sense of scruples who stayed nimble, for a time, even as he was getting heat from the feds as well as the crime syndicates threatened by a lone wolf. "Extraordinary life, so short, burned so bright," Mann says. "Sophisticated thinker, but shortsighted."

Most people, he says, know how Dillinger died, outside the Biograph Theatre on Lincoln Avenue, on a sticky July night in 1934, after seeing Clark Gable in "Manhattan Melodrama," co-starring William Powell and Myrna Loy. "There's no drama in that," he says. But there's a key to Dillinger, Mann says, in one of Gable's lines from that picture, spoken as his character — a gangster with scruples — heads off to the electric chair. Mann loves quoting it.

"'Die the way you live — all of a sudden. That's the way to go.'" Mann relishes the phrasing. "That '30s fatalism is fantastic.

It's there in Hemingway, in the movies, every place you look. You have to wonder what Dillinger was thinking, watching this scene. Was it the first time in his life he ever thought about his future?"

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(c) 2009, Chicago Tribune.

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