De Niro acting for his mentor, Scorsese, does a tired, seen-it- before turn, whereas for Mann he delivers one of his zingiest performances in years.While Tarantino is generally seen as the new Scorsese-in-waiting, Mann might just have stolen a march on both of them. He is besieged with film offers now.”I’ve made five films in 13 years and I don’t want to spend two or three years doing the next one so I’m looking to speed up. It makes you think you’ve never heard that in a film before so it feels very real and authentic. Then you really believe the jeopardy these people are in.”Heat came out at around the same time as Scorsese’s much trumpeted Casino, also starring De Niro. While its action sequences are the best of their kind ever committed to screen, he also takes time to develop the lives of even the peripheral characters “I wanted to explore the characters in Heat. I always felt Mohicans was too tight, too compressed.”As usual he did heavy research, bringing in three former SAS men to advise on close quarter combat in an urban environment for the shoot-out after the bank heist Attention to detail is what makes the sequence so riveting.

I mean you’re not gonna kid, coax, cajole or bribe Al or Bob to do anything they don’t want to do. Nobody Svengalis anybody – these guys have been around too long for that.”The heist movie, which pits Pacino’s on-the- edge cop against De Niro’s control freak professional robber, is a heavily revised version of a TV movie Mann did in 1989. I built a house for him influenced by William Lescaze, the late 1940s futurist architect. Right angles are rational so there are no right angles in Dollarhyde’s house – you have strange angles and intersecting planes all bathed in blue light.”For Heat, Mann attracted a first-rate cast headed by Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, on screen together for the first time ever Mann is modest about this achievement “There’s no entrepreneurship, I just showed them the script. “For example in the massacre in the forest, amid all the butchery, the critical path for the scene is that Hawkeye is trying to find Cora, the woman he cares about.

So I went for a piece of music – it was a perpetuum mobile – which keeps the tension building and building in his search for her Then when he finds her and saves her it resolves. It never hits a tonic but we bolted on the main theme at the end of it.”Manhunter, which he made in a break from Miami Vice, is notable for its extreme stylisation and use of futuristic architecture. “I was looking for a way to express the psychopathology of this world of horrific crimes without actually showing what Dollarhyde, the serial killer, had done in a realistic way. I want to affect the way audiences think and feel as accurately as I can so I don’t want to leave anything to chance.

If something isn’t quite right so the effect of the scene is diluted or one extra pops out wrong to your eye and blows the authenticity of a major moment – well, these things can’t be allowed to happen That’s the kind of detail I’m interested in. But what colour the cars are? I really don’t give a shit.”Music again played an important part in making Mohicans a gut-wrenching experience “I use whatever feels right for the story,” Mann says. The director of photography was fired halfway through the project, complaining, “He wants to do everything himself.” Mann is unapologetic.”Everything impacts on an audience Everything. For Last of the Mohicans he levelled hills, cleared 38 acres of trees and hired 130 carpenters to recreate Fort William Henry.